How to Clone a Mammoth

by Shapiro, Beth

  To summarize, is not at all clear how endangered species regulations will apply to resurrected species or traits. De-extinction certainly does not fit neatly within any existing regulatory mechanism, and different types of de-extinctions (cloned bucardos versus slightly modified band-tailed pigeons) are likely to fall into different regulatory categories and to require new interpretations of existing rules. It is also unlikely that there will be widespread agreement among or even within countries about what can and should be done to regulate de-extinction and manage resurrected species. Only one thing is certain: genetic modification of living things is possible, and genetically modified organisms for the purpose of conservation will soon exist.

  There is some good news for resurrected mammoths. If mammoths are brought back and introduced into a private park, whether that park is in the United States or in northeastern Siberia, these mammoths would not be regulated either as GMOs or by national environmental laws. Visitors to the park may even be allowed to hunt and eat the resurrected mammoths without breaking any national laws. Local laws might apply, so the location of the park could be important. For now, however, Sergey Zimov’s plan to rewild his Pleistocene Park in Siberia with genetically modified elephants faces no obvious regulatory obstacles.

  TOWARD REWILDING AND ECOLOGICAL RESURRECTION

  The idea to rewild North America with living species that would act as proxies for the extinct, native megafauna of the Late Pleistocene made a big splash when it was first introduced in 2005. Reactions varied from overwhelming enthusiasm to almost violent rejection. After a few months, rewilding gradually disappeared from the headlines of the mainstream media and became relegated to specialist, scientific reports. Some of these were continuations of the ongoing debate about whether or not rewilding was a practical tool for the purposes of conserving biodiversity, or about what the target baseline for rewilding projects should be. (Should we aim for a Late Pleistocene-like landscape, or a pre-European-like landscape?) Other reports contained success stories, such as the removal of invasive species and reestablishment of native species on islands that were sufficiently small for such projects to be tractable. While the scale of these successes was much smaller than that envisioned by Josh Donlan and his colleagues in their 2005 article, these successes were nonetheless important. They demonstrated that rewilding—and, by extension, de-extinction—is a strategy that can change landscapes in dramatic and fundamental ways.

  Of course, the ecological changes brought about by the release of resurrected species into wild habitats might not always be those that were envisioned at the start of the de-extinction project. When a resurrected species (or a species with resurrected traits) is introduced into an ecosystem, its introduction will change that ecosystem, just as its extinction did. However, the ecosystem will have evolved since its disappearance, and how the ecosystem will respond to its reappearance is not entirely predictable. Given the knowledge that we cannot completely control the results of our experiments, should we proceed? When is the risk of de-extinction worth the potential reward?

  CHAPTER 11

  SHOULD WE?

  On March 15, 2013, a TEDx event was held at the National Geographic Society headquarters in Washington, DC, to celebrate and inaugurate the idea of de-extinction.1 The event coincided with publication of Carl Zimmer’s National Geographic Magazine cover story, “Bringing Them Back to Life.”2

  On March 16, 2013, “de-extinction” hit the headlines like only new wars, missing airplanes, or resurrected mammoths can. Those of us who were involved with the event anticipated that this might happen. Our biggest concern was to try to limit hyperbole so that our message could be heard by anyone who cared to hear it. Those among us who supported de-extinction—and not all of us in the program did—hoped that de-extinction would become a tool that the conservation community could add to their existing arsenal of defense mechanisms against contemporary extinctions. We worried, however, that we would instead be seen by this community as, at best, jostling to compete with them for already limited resources and, at worst, providing a convenient excuse for the rest of the world to care even less about protecting endangered species.

  At a rehearsal on the day before the big event, Ryan Phelan and Stewart Brand, who organized the event, passed around a media package that contained concise and clear (and consistent) answers to what they predicted would be the most common questions. The night before the event, they and we (the speakers) hosted a select group of local and national media, politicians, and heads of conservation-oriented NGOs at an invitation-only kickoff event. With this, we hoped to persuade stakeholders that the science we would be presenting was real, that we cared deeply about and understood the historical and political context in which we were operating, and that we were very much aware of how our message might affect—both positively and negatively—conservation movements within the United States and internationally. We wanted to be clear that our intention was not to sensationalize science fiction but to engage stakeholders and the public in a reasonable, scientifically validated debate.

  The TEDx event was brilliantly organized, academically interesting, and a lot of fun. My talk was not particularly positive about the prospects of bringing exact replicas of extinct species back to life. Other talks were more enthusiastic, predicting major advances in no time at all. Mike Archer, an Australian scientist who is leading a group called the Lazarus Project, presented brand new results that were released to the media in Australia during his presentation. Mike’s research team had just succeeded in creating embryos from frozen cells of the extinct Lazarus frog, which was an awesomely peculiar amphibian that swallowed its tadpoles and later regurgitated fully metamorphosed juvenile frogs. Although the Lazarus frog embryos did not live for more than a few days, Mike insisted, correctly, that this was a major step forward in Lazarus frog de-extinction. Ben Novak unabashedly displayed his obsession with the passenger pigeon by presenting a detailed plan for exactly how he was going to release them into the wild after they were brought back to life. Distinguished professors of conservation biology, philosophy, law, and ethics brought up orthogonal points relating to whether or not de-extinction was realistic, dangerous, or (and?) morally reprehensible.

  The initial reaction to the TEDx event was mostly one of unadulterated excitement. The mammoth was going to be cloned! (Clearly, nobody paid attention to my presentation.) The passenger pigeon was going to darken the skies once more! (Everyone seemed to have forgotten Michael McGrew’s talk, during which he explained to the audience that birds cannot be cloned.) The world was going to be saved! (Perhaps no one remembered Stanley Temple’s talk, which highlighted the need for careful consideration of the ecological consequences of introducing an extinct species to an ecosystem that had continued to evolve in its absence.) George Church was going to change the world! (Yes, that’s probably true.)

  Doom and impending catastrophe sell more newspapers, magazines, and documentaries than do happy visions of the future. This is not new to conservation scientists. Irreversible climate change, imminent extinctions, the disappearance of the forests and the animals in them—those are the topics of headlines. Solutions, success stories, reintroductions—these stories are relegated to the space beneath the classifieds. The headlines about de-extinction were clear. De-extinction is dangerous. Some scientists say it’s a bad idea. It could and probably will go horribly wrong, just like in Jurassic Park. And given that it is definitely happening and the mammoth is being cloned and passenger pigeons are about to darken the skies again and Lazarus frogs will soon be barfing up their babies, the public should be scared. The public should stop de-extinction from happening! At the very least, the public should make it known that they are aware of the sneaky, dangerous stuff going on in those ivory towers and that it doesn’t make them happy.

  I started to get hate mail. I was both terrified and surprised by this. My presentation had been one of the most negative, pointing out, as I have in this book, all of the challenges facing those
who wish to bring extinct species back to life. In my many media interviews that followed, I did my best to maintain a positive yet skeptical outlook. The media, with some exceptions,3 have often been less than appreciative of my skepticism. I’ve been in several interviews in which the interviewer spent a lot of energy trying to get me to say something sensational or controversial—as if “Yes, I am working with others to bring back something similar to the mammoth and passenger pigeon” is not sensational enough.

  I also got fan mail. Several people wrote to congratulate us on our bravery and foresight. People offered to send us bones, teeth, and feathers that they’d found while gardening. Students wrote heartfelt letters begging to join the lab so that they could be involved with bringing back the passenger pigeon. Mike Sweeny, who is the executive director of Nature Conservancy in California, contacted me to see whether there was some way that his organization could help with de-extinction in California. There was a tremendous, positive outpouring of support.

  The hate mail was equally sincere. I was accused of playing God. I learned that I was going to bring about the end of the world. I was informed that I was a menace to society and should be stripped of my academic credentials. One note even suggested that I should be the first meal for any saber-toothed cat that we managed to bring back.

  Professional scientists don’t send hate mail, but they do publish hate papers. Several very smart, very highly regarded scientists came out in force against the de-extinction movement. Professor Paul Ehrlich is an eminent scientist at Stanford University and the president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. He is perhaps best known for his ominous predictions about what will happen to the world if human populations continue to grow as they are today. Ehrlich emphatically refused an invitation to attend a workshop at his own university that was sponsored and organized by Professor Hank Greely, an equally eminent law professor who specializes in biotechnology law. In fact, Ehrlich recommended so forcibly that no one in his department make the slightest pretense toward supporting the idea of de-extinction that not a single Stanford biologist was present at the meeting, despite the fact that it took place on their doorstep and aimed to address precisely the topics that infuriated Ehrlich.

  Months later, Ehrlich agreed to a public debate of sorts with Stewart Brand, who, it turns out, had studied as an undergraduate under Ehrlich when Ehrlich first joined the Stanford faculty in 1959, and whom Ehrlich still considers to be a good friend. The debate was not a conversation but, instead, a pair of written essays that presented opposing views about whether de-extinction should go forward.

  When I first read Professor Ehrlich’s essay, I was surprised by many of the issues he chose to highlight. What surprised me was that many of the problems he noted, while certainly valid, important, and deserving of consideration, are not unique to de-extinction. The problems he highlighted are the same problems that come up every time a new tool for biodiversity conservation is proposed, an embattled realm in which Ehrlich himself is no stranger. While Ehrlich begins his essay by taking issue with the financial cost of de-extinction, his more powerful objections are to the indirect but potentially more insidious costs—the potential costs to society, to endangered species, and to endangered ecosystems.

  From the meanest to the most profound, all objections to de-extinction arise from genuine fears and deserve to be addressed. Below, I attempt to speak to those concerns that I hear most often or that I feel are the most central to the ongoing debate. Not every question can be answered, and this is one of the most troubling truths about de-extinction. Certainly, there will be costs associated with de-extinction, including costs that we have yet to imagine. I feel strongly, however, that there is one very important cost that Professor Ehrlich and the often-anonymous writers of hate mail fail to cite: the cost of doing nothing.

  WE MIGHT REVIVE DANGEROUS PATHOGENS

  Since we cannot know exactly why the last few individuals of an extinct species died, is there a chance that it was a dangerous pathogen that killed them? And if we bring these individuals back to life, might we also bring back that dangerous pathogen?

  Probably not. In addressing this, it is important to consider where pathogens would be preserved. Most pathogens do not integrate into the genomes of the organisms they infect. Instead, they attack a specific part of that organism—the lungs, for example, or liver, or blood cells. If tissues could be revived from an extinct organism and those tissues happened to contain a pathogen, then it is possible that the pathogen could also be revived. One of the recent mammoth finds in Siberia contains what looks like blood, which contains what looks like blood cells. If this organism had been infected by a blood-borne pathogen, then this blood-like substance could have included what looked like cells from blood-borne pathogens (it did not, as far as I know). However, it has not yet been possible to revive cells from extinct species, as the genetic material within them is simply too degraded. This will apply to pathogen genomes as well. No recovered pathogen cell will be sufficiently intact that it is capable of coming back to life.

  Genomes do contain some viruses that integrate into the genome. Our own genomes are full of such viruses, the vast majority of which are not harmful. If we were to extract DNA from a bone and sequence everything that was recovered, the mixed pool of extracted DNA would include DNA from the animal whose bone it was, DNA from infectious pathogens that were present at the time of death, and DNA from anything that got into the bone—including other pathogens—during burial and excavation. All of this DNA, however, at least all of it that is ancient, will be fragmentary and damaged, as expected for ancient DNA. Any ancient viruses or pathogens that were preserved within that sample would certainly not be in any state to be infectious.

  DE-EXTINCTION IS NOT FAIR TO THE ANIMALS

  This might be true. Animal welfare does need to be considered explicitly when developing a plan for de-extinction. In previous chapters, I outlined some of the ways that animals might be exploited or harmed in the course of this work. Some species—such as Steller’s sea cow—may be terrible candidates for de-extinction, simply because it would be impossible to resurrect them without causing unnecessary animal suffering. As technology advances, this may become less true. For example, technology that allows in vitro rather than in vivo gestation would eliminate the requirement for cross-species gestation. From an animal-welfare perspective, the captive-breeding stage is likely to be one of the most challenging steps of de-extinction. Better understanding of the basic needs of animals in captivity and of how we can minimize the effects of being raised in captivity once animals are released in the wild will be key to the success of de-extinction. These are areas of active research, and advances will come. As of today, the possibility that too many animals might suffer remains a serious obstacle to de-extinction.

  WE SHOULD PRIORITIZE CONSERVATION OF SPECIES THAT ARE ALIVE TODAY

  In 2014, I participated in a conference in Oxford, UK, on the importance of megafauna—both extinct and extant—in maintaining the ecosystems in which they live. The keynote speaker was George Monbiot, a journalist and environmental activist who writes a weekly column for the Guardian. Monbiot’s speech was a lively and impassioned plea to support rewilding in Europe. At an emotional apex and with tears forming in his eyes (at least in my memory), he roared angrily, “Those billionaires that are funding de-extinction—they should instead be investing their millions to introduce the Asian elephant to Europe!”

  I agree with him about the elephants. One of Monbiot’s most salient points was that the European vegetation had evolved in conjunction with a type of elephant—a mammoth—and, since elephants are missing at present, we should put them back if we can find a place for them. I agree. If elephants, whose native habitat is dwindling, could be introduced into pockets of Europe where efforts are already under way to rewild, why not do so? Asian elephants might even survive without genetic manipulation in parts of Europe.

  But the billionaires? Who and where are they? And m
ay I have their number? As of this moment, I know of no de-extinction project that is being funded, much less being funded by billionaires. The biotech development that is going on in the Church lab is only possible because the technology itself has another purpose—specifically the purpose of curing human disease. Money for my group to sequence genomes from passenger pigeons and band-tailed pigeons has been cobbled together out of my small research budget from the University of California, some funds from private foundations that are dedicated to developing techniques for the assembly of ancient genomes, a donation of several thousand dollars from Revive & Restore, and voluntary time from people like Ben Novak, Ed Green, and others working in the group. The bucardo project has some support from a local hunting federation, but certainly not enough to fund an entire de-extinction project. If billionaires are investing in de-extinction, I haven’t heard about it. But I would like to hear more.

  Should de-extinction compete for resources aimed at the preservation of living species and habitats? Absolutely not. Is de-extinction competing for resources with these organizations? Today, the answer is very clearly no. In 2014, the US government budgeted just under $414 million for all of its international conservation initiatives and exactly $0 for de-extinction research. Conservation International reports spending around $140 million every year, $0 of which is spent on de-extinction projects. The World Wildlife Fund spends around $225 million on its various international programs, none of which involve or are related to de-extinction.

  The costs of later stages of de-extinction, including captive breeding and release and the long-term management of free-living populations, will be harder to tuck neatly away into the budgets of other projects. It is doubtful that breeding mammoths will lead to a cure for human genetic disease, for example, which makes it hard to justify mammoth-breeding expenses on a grant from the National Institutes of Health. When it’s time to breed mammoths, new sources of money will have to be found. These sources are likely to be different from those that fund existing conservation initiatives. People give to causes they care about, and different people care about different things. The people who care about the plight of polar bears or pandas will probably not be the same as the people who want to bring passenger pigeons back to life. Hopefully, as de-extinction as we perceive it gains momentum, this will lead to the discovery of new sources of funding for conservation initiatives and a strengthened focus on the creation and preservation of wild habitats.